Vulnerable systems had plenty of
opportunity to be patched and weren’t
•Systems administrators didn’t know there was a
vulnerability?
•Systems administrators didn’t know there was a
patch?
•Media didn’t explain that there was a vulnerability or a
patch?”
•
“Cyber terrorism” is a real threat
•One of the first things the worm did when it infected a
machine was to check to see if that
machine used English as the default language (If so the web
page was defaced).
•Probably more than 200,000 of the infected machines were
in the U.S., U.K., Canada,
Australia, and New Zealand.
•The worm could have easily caused billions of dollars
more in data loss for
English-speaking-countries only.
•The denial-of-service attack on the White House would
probably have succeeded had the
attacker used the URL instead of the IP address.